Have you noticed that a single basic beat has become the rhythmic soundtrack to everything?
Technically classified as a "shuffle," this particular beat began its rise as a favorite of old-school rappers. By the 1990s it was the time signature of hip-hop culture. The beat, however, had an even greater mission. It spread by way of DJs into every genre of music and to every corner of the planet. Over the past three decades this particular 'beat' has become predominant in most popular music as well as movie and television soundtracks. It is now too widespread to be called a “hip-hop” beat. It is simply the rhythm that has conquered the world.
In the 1960s it was possible to listen to Top 40 radio and hear mambo, swing, waltz, cha-cha-cha, polka, rock, and samba. Now such a variety of distinct dance beats is unimaginable. This loss of rhythmic diversity began with the rise of disco music and drum machines in the late 1970s. Many people tend to think of disco music as faddish genre that was briefly popular in late seventies and early eighties. As Frank Zappa famously put it at the time: “Discos are places where dull, boring people go to meet other dull, boring people and reproduce." Perhaps it is this general reluctance to credit disco with anything resembling cultural innovation that leads us to overlook its lasting impact on the history of popular dance rhythm.
The so-called clap track common to every disco song is a sharp accent on the offbeat. Not only did it make disco dancing easy by inviting the dancer to simply shift their weight back-and-forth to the beat. The clap track was also the means of calibration DJs used to sync tracks as they blended one record with the next. Without it, a song wasn’t likely to get in the mix.
Hip-hop, techno, house, and other DJ driven genres emerged as ways for DJs to “take the music back.” They took commercial dance beats and turned them on their head. They mixed, and scratched, and rapped new genres into being. They left Zappa’s “boring” disco in their dust, but they preserved two crucial elements of discothèque chic: the DJ, and the clap track.
DJs can’t help but select for rhythmic uniformity, so that different source materials will easily blend together into a seamless flow. This process not only severely limits the range of beats; it also demands a mechanical regularity of tempo that mitigates against any tempo shifts for dynamic effect. Indeed, human drummers, with their stylistic inflections and performative eccentricities are a liability for those who want to get into the mix.
Early drum machine programmers worked to build variation and "play" into their tracks to avoid too mechanized a sound. Such a concern now seems quaint as digitized beats and indeed voices are now the common currency of popular music.
Eager to get into the mix of the ever more economically crucial DJ culture, commercial rock, pop, and "alternative music" were rapidly assimilated to the shuffle orthodoxy in the 1990s. Popular country music has now largely succumbed, with surprisingly little resistance.
Examined entirely from a rhythmic perspective, the late phases of Punk, particularly the “thrash” bands that reigned in California in the eighties, were rock’s last valiant underground resistance to the great rhythmic assimilation. The densely packed wall-of-sound produced by those ensembles was fast and brilliantly accentless. They rejected "danceable" beats with a passion that matched Arnold Schoenberg’s distain for harmony. Not that they didn't dance. Indeed, “thrashing” was foremost a form of dance, a refinement of punk “slam dancing” into a structured collective improvisation: a roughly circular wave of slow-motion group flailing that always appeared on the verge of violence but was (usually) kept artfully under control. Punk rock’s resistance to assimilation by the culture industry is legendary. If "not selling out" is the holy grail of rock mythology, then punks are its saints. Punk has become a true folk music, kept vital by untold thousands of bands. As far as commercially produced music is concerned, rhythmic hegemony of the shuffle has become undeniable.
It wasn't until I began to examine the global extent of the current loss of rhythmic diversity that I began to find it troubling. Have you listened to any Hong Kong pop music recently? Or noticed the way that Bollywood movie music, while featuring traditional instrumentation, tends to favor tabla inflected shuffle beats? At present, the many genres of Latin American popular music represent the last reserve of both African dance rhythms, and European popular dances such as polka and waltz. But even salsa, which until recently danced smartly on its Afro-Cuban mambo roots, is drifting toward the shuffle, pulled by the tide of reggaeton (a reggae-inflected hybrid of the break-beat). DJs remain, of course, the common vector for the spread of the shuffle in Latin America.
We don't really want to blame DJs for this rhythmic mass-extinction. They were just trying to take back the music and make it real again. And in the final analysis, DJs and the rappers produced a lot of great work, in spite of the pressures of commercialization, music mogul machinations, poseurs, sell-outs and other typical music industry nonsense.
We certainly don't mean to demonize a particular beat, or artists who use particular beats. Virtually all of us need to shuffle now and then. It’s a great beat that feels good to move to – that’s the quality that got it to where it is now. So feel no shame – don't feel guilty when you catch yourself movin' to the funky beat of a car commercial. If the music makes you want to move, then move baby! That’s what it all about.
We support all artists, whatever their genre or medium. We support dance in particular. Remember that the beat goes on until we stop dancing. Don't let commercial culture and mosh-pits allow us to lose the grand human heritage of popular dance and live music.
We're not against anyone. We just want to encourage you to support the musicians in your commuities. Enjoy some of the many local bands with drummers that continue to play the old dance rhythms. While you are at it, show your support for rhythmic diversity, and buy that drummer a beer!
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